Last week, was the 45th gathering of the Santa
Barbara Writers Conference. Once in a while a student comes along whose talent
shines through. Back in the nineties, it was Michele Serros, who wore a simple
name tag that said, 'Girl Writer.' This year, I am pleased to introduce Antonio
López. Remember the name, he will be rocking your book shelves in the very near
future. He won First Prize in Poetry at the conference. Honorable Mentions for
the 2017 Poetry Prize include Steve Braff and Claire Hsu Accomando I mentioned
to Antonio that the last time a Chicano or Latinx or Person of Color won First Prize
in Poetry was myself in 2003. La Bloga is pleased to offer this thoughtful
interview with rising literary star, Antonio López. As you'll read from the interview, the 23-year-old poet has a promising career in both literary arts and law.

East Beach across the street from the Santa Barbara Writers Conference

Melinda
Palacio

1.
When did you start writing poetry?

Antonio
López

1. I started writing poetry in high school. I started when I wrote
a short story for my girlfriend at the time (lasted like 3 months but it was
one of the catalysts). It opened up the prospect of "Huh, I'm kinda good
at this, and I enjoy getting caught up in my mind, making a story and so
forth." In class, we were reading The
Scarlet Letter, so a lot of my lines were overwrought, the images were over
the top, and probably mixed with each other in confusing ways. But after
submitting one story, my teacher, Ms. Gertmenian got back to me and said her
work reminded her of Garcia Marquez. One
Hundred Years of Solitude was the probably the first Latino author I
remember reading.

But as I wrote more stories, I realized I loved, even obsessed,
over certain lines and details. I'd be walking the street, using cumbias and
rap and sonideros to help induce the image out the mind's womb. After writing
my first personal statements for college, then outpoured the stories of all the
things I saw grow up--the guns that sounded like fireworks, the slang that I
suddenly stopped at my high school prep, the chisme and dirty jokes 8th grade
boys say to each other like prayers. the struggle for self-worth at an
almost-white school. I encountered my culture on the page, and it lit my world.

PALACIO

2.
You are a student at Duke, off to Law School ? Will poetry continue to be a
part of your life? Who are some of your influences?

LÓPEZ

2. I actually graduated from Duke in 2016, and am now a rising 2nd
year MFA student at Rutgers University at Newark, NJ. Law school is an idea
that at first, I was toying with, but recently I was accepted into a prep
program called the UCLA Law Fellows, an initiative, now in its 20th year, that
creates a pipeline for minority students to pursue the profession. Their
classes on precedents, their inspiring speakers (many of them alumni of the
program), and their scholarship to take an LSAT class in the fall, have made me
realized how much support God has laid to follow my dreams. Namely, to
represent undocumented migrants while also writing their stories (whether
nonfiction or fictionalized).

As influences, I read Anzaldua my freshman year in college, and I
thought both her theoretical understanding of what I was living (the psychic
borderlands) along with her bilingual poetry, were just stunning. I also loved
watching, and re-watching, the old school Def Poetry Jam where Mos Def would be
the emcee. There, I learned of poets like Saul Williams, Louis Reyes Rivera,
Victor Hernandez Cruz. From early on, Spoken Word was a genre that drew me. Its
energy, its political posture, the way language can pack un golpe, and if
you're lucky, un putazo.

But these usherings of musc came from specific people. Growing up,
I burned CD's with my cousin Miguel Angel, and he'd introduce me to Nas,
Common, KRS-One, Rakim, as well as some contemporary rappers. When I was 15 or
so, a woman at the Boys and Girls Club put on me onto Gil Scott Heron and the
Last Poets. Education scholar Jason Mendez gave a presentation that
interspersed Pedro Pietri's "Puerto Rican Obituary" with Wu Tan
Clan's "I Can't Sleep." I swallowed these beats like water. My mentor
in college, Nathaniel Mackey, further added to my list Juan Felipe Herrera and
Lorna Dee Cervantes. It's an ongoing list of mentor and predecessor. These
muses, or maybe better put, duendistas, all walk with me as I put word to page.

PALACIO

3.
I see you are attending several conferences this summer, including the Santa
Barbara Writers Conference, where you impressed a whole conference with your
poetry, where are you off to next? I think you mentioned Squaw Valley? Is the
SBWC your first conference or have you been to others? If so which ones and how
were they different?

Congratulations
on winning first place in poetry. (I wasn't there for the ceremony, were there
runners up, honorable mentions?)

LOPEZ

3. a. I am indeed in Squaw Valley right now. Strictly within
writing, I've also attended the Yale Writers' Conference, Santa Barbara of
course, and AWP this year. I believe our beloved friend, Claire, received the
honorable mention for the Santa Barbara competition.

PALACIO

3.b
What are some of the other poetry awards you have received and when? Did you
receive a full scholarship for Squaw Valley?

LOPEZ

b. Here at Squaw, I'm grateful to have received the Lucille
Clifton Memorial Scholarship, which covers tuition and housing. Other awards
I've won is AWP's Open Mic & Old School Poetry Slam Competition this
past February. I was also a finalist for the 9th Annual
Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition (also this year). And in 2016, I was the
inaugural winner for the William Rosati Creative Writing Award at Duke University.

PALACIO

4.
At Duke, you study with Aracelis Girmay? Can you describe the mentorship and
which courses you've taken with her? Is this for your MFA at Rutgers? You
mentioned, I think, also going to Law School?

LOPEZ

4. At Duke, I studied with the likes of Nate
Mackey and Peter Moore. But poetry is a fairly recent endeavor as a career
path. Before that, I heavily studied Cultural Studies with Wahneema Lubiano,
Antonio Viego, Walter Mignolo, William Darity, and in the field of
African-American Studies, the late, brilliant Raymond Gavins. At Rutgers, I'm
blessed to have the mentorship of Rigoberto Gonzalez and Brenda Shaughnessy.
I've taken workshops with both, where they've always provided a critical, but
nurturing space for all us poets. I should also say that while a Fiction
professor, Alice Dark is a person who has moved (both in the physical and
sentimental sense) me to expand my craft. I am working on a memoir,Bajo Otra Luna, and it'd be a disservice to her work if I din't mention that the first
few chapters came from her "Writers at Newark" class.

PALACIO

5.
Do you also study history. From the few poems I've read you seem well versed in
Aztec culture and Meso American history. Can you talk about your use of
juxtaposing the ancient cultura with current times and how you started putting
the two together in your poems? Did you also minor in Spanish or have you
formally studied Spanish? It's impressive how seamlessly your poems switch
between Spanish and English.

LOPEZ

5. History was my first love. I remember taking World
History in high school, and learning about different civilizations and wars
felt empowering in Menlo School, a place where I was often the only Latino in
my classrooms. In college, the very first class I took was one on the US-Mexico
Border with Sarah Deutsch. In my spare time, I watched and re-watched PBS'
Chicano: A History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement. There, I learned of
the '68 Walkouts (which made me realize that what we were doing for the Day
Without an Immigrant Protests were the same), the Moratorium, Sal Castro, Reis
Lopez Tijerina, but most importantly, Corky Gonzalez's "Yo Soy
Joaquin." This encouraged my continual private interest in studying Aztec
mythology.

History (and study) is a huge marker for me. As an undergrad, I
became obsessed with radical left philosophy (anarchism), then moved to
studying political dissidents (Angela Davis, George Jackson, Leonard Peltier),
and now I've settled into a religious mythology phase (Sufist poetry,
Aztec myths, the Naat devotional songs to the prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the
South Asian qawwali form [songs to God] and studying the Qur'an. I think
reciting the Qur'an has affected and heavily influenced my penchant for the
anaphora.

PALACIO

5.
b. Maybe you have other poems that reveal different identities. I only heard
two of your poems. Can you talk a little more about how you identify yourself
and what is the cultural background of your family/parents, is it different
from yours?

LOPEZ

b. We need more myths, because that's how we remember we come from
greatness. That we too speak of rivers, called chinampas, called El Rio Bravo,
etc. Incorporating ancient culture gives the present moment (whether it be
immigration, deportations, poverty, discrimination) more perspective. It makes
us richer, more powerful. If we just caught up in the present, then we lose
sight of our longevity as a people. As the EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion
Nacional) said, as their opening words to the NAFTA-sparked uprising of 1994,
"We are the product of 500 years of struggle."

With regards to my use of billingualism, that's just how we as
Latinxs live. In poems like "Moscatero" for instance, you'll hear
Mexican slang because it is an absolute necessity to tell this literary world,
"This are the people I live, love, dream, and fight about, and in their own words." Of
course, in a largely monolingual canon, I have to always negotiate this
code-switching, which is a different act from translation. The latter says I'm
ostensibly of another place, whereas this Spanglish is, as Anzaldua said,
"a forked tongue...ni de aqui ni de alla." This is a different world,
yet one uttered, sung, lamented, and praised by millions of people in this
country, every second, every day., every latido, every suspiro. Behind
restaurant kitchens, atop broken shingles, inside maquilladoras, inside misas.
I've had several folks say, "I don't understand what the speaker's
saying," as if that were negative connotations. I want to tell them,
"You know how many of my generation and background wish they can talk back
to their bosses, who wished they could fight for their rights? Will all due
respect, your discomfort pales (often literal on a racial level) with their
experience." I want my readers to struggle, to sweat, because that's
exactly their , and our, way(s) of living.

Last little note, when I hear the word frijoles, plumes of smoke
in the cocina just burst in my mind. So many recuerdos and fights and flavors
and "te sirvo mas mi'jo," and queso cotija falling on my plate like
the first snow el barrio's ever seen, and so forth. But if I said beans, it
sounds dull, stripped of its sharp. I hear Bush's Best commercials and tacky
Westerns of dirt-lathered Anglos roasting a can over a bonfire. These aren't my
memories. My mother, my grandmother, my father, even my little brother, all say
frijoles, and so that's how it'll exist on the page.

PALACIO

6.
Where are you originally from? Did you experience any type of culture shock
going to college in the East coast?

LOPEZ

6. I was born and raised in East Palo Alto, once an inner city in
the middle of the SF Bay Area, but has in recent years been heavily gentrified
by Facebook, and now, Amazon. Culture shock did hit me at the Duke's campus
itself, but Durham itself was and is experiencing a huge influx of Latino
migrants (almost 300% in the last decade), so I felt I had my people nearby.
But again, within the Gothic Wonderland, I hadn't ever seen so much wealth in
my life. I experienced this weird twilight zone of PoC mobility, where I had a
food points account larger than what my parents made over a month.

Being in Newark, New Jersey, for my MFA has forced me to expand my
sense of Latinidad. As a Mexican, I hold the hegemony of being immediately
associated with Latino in US public discourse, along with the stereotypical
foods, mannerisms, sayings that go with it. Here though, I regularly meet and
chat with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Trinidadians, Brazilians, and
folks with multiple origins of descent. I truly believe it's enriched my music
on the page, the way I hear Boricua cut through words, like if they're in a
hurry, a mini-seminar on elision when I hear them drop the 's' in Moises, to
give just one example.

PALACIO

7.
Are there any other poets, storytellers in your family?

LOPEZ

7. You know, so much of being called a poet has a class element to
it, where you have the luxury of saying, out of the top priorities of one's
vocation, "I am a poet." So while I don't have any
"writers" in my immediate family-- I do have a couple primas who
write for themselves (Shout out to Berenice Silva and Mari Mendez). Because of
the demand of full time, they largely don't have a space to carve out their
voice textually.

That said though, my family has some phenomenal storytellers. I
always tell people, you can gather volumes of rich commentary just hearing a
dinner table. When after the chiquillos are asleep, and papa gets out of a
nightshift, and he and his hermana share their lamentos del dia. I consider my
tia Carmelita to be an amazing orator, her voice brimming with humor and grace.
And to me, that's what inspired my honors thesis at my undergraduate years,
titled ethnopoetics, a term
inspired by Anzauldua and Chela Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed, which attempts to describe our
naturally poetic ability to navigate struggle. To me, that's the heart of all
Latinidades, and by extension, marginalities.

8.
You don't have a book of poems out yet, but it sounds like you are well on your
way to putting a book together. Tell us some of the places that have published
your work. Do you only write poetry or are you published in other genres?

LOPEZ

8. Correct, I don't technically have a book, but stay tuned I
suppose insha'Allah (ojala). So far, I've been published in Teenink, Acentos
Review (Shout out to Raina Leon), Hispanecdotes, PEN/America, Sinking City
Press, and this summer, I'll have pieces in Gramma Press, Eclectica,
Permafrost, By & By, and Track//Four.

But I've published other genres outside of poetry. My very first
publication in Teenink talked about the hard-hitting jump from an inner city
K-8 to being a token at predominately white, affluent college prep. I've
published a number of nonfiction pieces at Duke's newspaper, The Chronicle, while a student. All
these articles centered on identity politics as a 1st generation
Mexican-American, responding to issues of social justice, including the noose
incident, and covering the successful boycott of our own Latino Student
Recruitment Weekend in order to pressure administration to fund a Latinx Center,
now called La Casa. Most recently, I published a piece in PEN/America on what
it's like to be a Latino Muslim. And right now, I am working on a memoir, Bajo Otra Luna.

PALACIO

9.
We spoke briefly of identity and names. Did you have a stronger sense of self
after writing and discovering poetry?

LOPEZ

9. Absolutely! Mil veces si. As a Muslim, I understand God has
given me this language to touch others. There's a lovely verse in the Qur'an in
surat Al-Nisa (The Women), which goes, " ...Allah knows what is in their
hearts, so turn away from them but admonish them and speak to them a
far-reaching word." (4:63) The root word of far-reaching, baligh,
can also translate to eloquence, that which can penetrate deeply. To me, this
elucidates the power of poetry, and expression generally, to touch others, to
the effect of steering them in a better direction.

In poetry, I can put together La Virgen Guadalupe and Khadijah, I
can denounce the racist legislation of Texas' Senate Bill 4, I can praise
raspado vendors who post their Venmo accounts on splintered carts, I can laugh
in a poem, this public document, at las jorobitas of passing abuelas. To me,
poetry is just testimony in its highest form, songs of gratitude for being
alive and brown.

PALACIO

10.
Gacias, Antonio. Thank you for taking time out of your retreat at the Community
of Writers at Squaw Valley this week to talk with La Bloga. Your generous
responses are much appreciated. I look forward to bragging and bloging about
your future books. I can say I knew you when. Is there anything else you'd like
to share with La Bloga?

LOPEZ

10. Just extreme appreciation for the opportunity to express my
love for this weird thing we do called writing, especially to say these words
at my hometurf of fellows Chicanxs and Latinxs.

I am huge believer for paying it forward, so if there's anyone
aspiring writers reading this, don't hesitate hitting me up, or asking me any,
any questions--on identity, writing, family, etc. As cliche as it seems, we're
here to help each other. Otherwise, how do we expect outside communities to
coalition with us?

Here's is
Antonio López's prize-winning poem. This post will also end with Antonio
reading his poem at the conference's awards banquet.

The murder of a teenage Muslim girlbeaten and killed by
a bat-wielding motorist near a Virginia mosque was likely a "road rage
incident", not a hate crime, US police said, prompting outrage from many
who say the teen was targeted because of her religion. Darwin Martinez
Torres, 22, has been arrested and charged with Nabra Hassanen's murder in an
incident police say began as a road dispute with a male teenager who was among
Hassanen's group. – Al Jazeera, June
20, 2017

Which Cobija Feels Most Comfy?: A
Letter to Sister Nabra

by Antonio López

As-Salaamu Alaykum Sister.

All is know

is that my brother

killed you

with a baseball bat. The same palo

slammed against birthday piñatas,

chased you out of a Fairfax highway.

Paper maché tapestries that bursted

with dulce and confetti stuffing,

now weaves into a hijab.

The slurs crosshaired.

All I know

is that my brother
grabbed
your bo-

grabbed your
bod-bo-

the papers said “dump,”

like your body was kitchen sink sewage,

the weight of chicken bones

and peeled carrots.

They said “road rage”—

your death as no more taxing

than a busted taillight

like when they said

Deah, Yusor, and Razan

were a “parking dispute.”

Ay hermanita,

I’ve spent the past four days

whispering your name

with hands cut
by the blades

of grass that pillowed your hair

with hands willowed
in dua,

but my palmlines fled

to trace their ancestry elsewhere,

across the Atlantic, to the Birth of a
Nation’s

Nation, where the ghoulish white hood

of a van drove into Finsbury park

shouting “All Muslims!

I want to kill all
Muslims!”

And for the first time,

I saw an
Islamic extremist—

Imam Mohamed Mahmoud

protects the suspect from the mob,

and issues the anti-Western fatwa

“We pushed people away,…

until he was safely taken

by police….”

Anti-Western,

because John Wayne

and all those aging saloonistas

who hawk a one-lunged Malboro

would’ve shot the sucker in a tacky
catchline

that would’ve earned 24% on Rotten
Tomatoes.’

Imam Mahmoud!

Imam Mahmoud who professed to Sky News

“I am no hero,”

but then who is ours?

Ya Allah, I beamed for a DC comic adhan

to call for a sunnah superhero.

But there’s no star-spangled shield

to guard your glasses and Jannah-gated
smile

because Captain America wasn’t made for
you.

No Wonder Woman to sway her jiggling
thighs,

half-naked feminism, to deflect blind-eyed

bat swings with an 8 karat belt buckle,

20% off a Macy’s rack.

Sister Nabra, let me make wudu

for you, and pluck from your hair,

the highway-thickets

of sound bites.

Sister, let me still pay

for next year’s prom dress—

a mermaid lavender,

so after iftar, I’ll sip chai

and hear the fiqh disputes

of uncles slamming

their hairy-knuckled

gavels,

“Istirgfilillah, there’ll be boys,
drinking,”

your father will interrupt,

“and me.”

Let me stand

over the Mexican minarets

of Univisión and Telemundo

and la pinta and the bus stop

and la clínica, and the good bench at
recess

and tell el pueblo, mi pueblo

to enshroud you in our finest cobijas—

those linens not even hawked at flea
markets

and quietly clean tu cuerpo,

over my grandmother’s pila

and wipe away the darkened bloodstains

with our finest jabón

over el agua nacida de la barranca,

the river mountaintops to see the
heights

my people could’ve soared for you.

Let my apolog—

take a lifetime,

take my lifeline—

hang on the word, ‘y?’

Why must
this land learn Arabic names

at the eight o’ clock news?

Why must
sister Aydin write a Facebook post

warning her muslimina girls to travel

in groups, even in broad daylight?

Why couldn’t you just finish Ramadan
first?!

Why?

Why?

Why?

Why.

Dear. Sister. Nabra,

All I know

is that every Muslim in America,

before Monday’s fajr, became an atheist

to American Progress.

Antonio López can be reached through email, Facebook, and Twitter @barrioscribe.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

I hear voices.
They come to me trapped in desk drawers and in stuffed file cabinets. They
laugh. They sigh. Yes, they cry. I know them all. Sometimes I find myself hiding
from them. Wait. Let me start again.

Some years ago, I
attended a presentation by activist-writer Ernesto B. Vigil, his most recent
book, “Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on
Dissent”.

Ernesto described
his close relationship with Corky Gonzalez and their early days in Denver,
Colorado starting the Chicano movement Crusade for Justice.

I asked Ernesto,
“Of everything you and Corky talked about, what was the most memorable thing he
said to you?”

Ernesto didn’t
hesitate. He answered, “Corky once told me that when we bury an elder, we bury
a library.”

I don’t know if
Corky invented the phrase or borrowed it from someone else. I do know that it
has stayed with me all these years.

At the time, my
father, mother, relatives, and many friends were in their late 80s, some into
their 90s and passing quickly. How many libraries had we buried? How many
stories covered, never to be unearthed? Do we, their descendants, bear some
responsibility in not mining the book shelves of their lives and keeping their
stories alive?

Fortunately, at
the time, I had already embarked on a journey recording the voices of Chicano
elders in my community.

Most of the men
and women I spoke to were born in the U.S. Some were descendants of the
California rancheros, but the majority descended from parents escaping
revolution and seeking better lives for their families. They called themselves
“Chicano” in private, as if only they understood the word’s true meaning. In
public, they called themselves Mexican, even though they were Americans. They balked
at the phrase Mexican-American.

Many of those I
interviewed described a cultural gap between themselves and their Mexican-born
parents. After all, the men and women of my parents’ generation were the WWII
generation, or as Tom Brokaw dubbed them, “The Greatest Generation;” though, in
his book of the same name, not one Chicano merited a coveted spot.

Still, in their
minds, they’d sacrificed for the U.S., some Chicanos experiencing the worst
fighting in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. The women remembered the
pain their families suffered upon learning that a brother or husband was not
returning home from the war. So, of course, they saw themselves as typically
American with few ties to Mexico. Other than partying forays into Tijuana or
Mexicali, most had never even traveled to Mexico’s interior.

They were the
children of Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, and Billy Holiday. They preferred
jazz to mariachis, though they’d release a giant grito if the spirit struck
them.

To them
acculturation wasn’t conceptual. It was a reality. Where their parents had been
snubbed by the system, my father’s generation fought to integrate labor unions,
politics, education, and employment. They didn’t think in terms of conservative
or liberal but in terms of justice or injustice.

Interested in
their view of Mejico, “la madre patria”, I interviewed my 90-plus year-old
uncle, Jess (RIP). I didn’t ask him why my grandmother had suddenly sent him to
Mexico in his late teens. He wasn’t about to tell me. (Though, I later learned
the real reason.) Still, he said he returned to his grandparents’ ranch outside
of San Gaspar de los Reyes, Jalisco, for a few years, and saw it as an
adventure. Since, he’d been educated in States, he could read and write well,
both English and Spanish, which helped in the family ranching business.

He worked hard.
He saved money and bought the most beautiful horse in “all the ranchos,” and,
“when I rode through the towns everyone would stop to watch me pass.”

I could hear the
pride in my uncle’s voice, as if he was still that teenage boy. He continued
his story telling me that one day, an uncle asked to borrow the horse. He
needed to go to town.

My uncle told me
he didn’t see his uncle for days. When he finally did see him, he asked about the
horse. His uncle answered, “What horse? Oh, that horse. I sold him.”

My uncle thought
that maybe his uncle needed the money. But no. He just decided to sell the
horse. My uncle asked the price. His anger mounted. He told me, “My horse was
worth three times that much.” He said in Mexico he had no right to question his
uncle’s actions. The first chance he got, he returned home, a bitter taste in
his mouth.

Regarding work, I talked to a family friend,
Bart Carrillo and his wife, Pearl. Bart, and his family, started one of the
first Mexican restaurant-bars on the west side (the first was Casa Escobar,
another family friend). Bart remembered when his father, who could barely speak
English, wanted to work in construction since it paid more than gardening.

“My dad heard
they were hiring, so he showed up early to the work site,” he said.

Most construction
workers were “white”. The foreman on the site asked Bart’s dad if he could lay
a sidewalk or use a trowel? Though, he’d never worked with either, Santos
Carrillo answered, “Yes.”

The foreman
handed him the trowel and told him to finish a sidewalk the workers had just
poured. Everybody stopped working and stood back to watch. Of course, Mr.
Carrillo had no idea what to do, but he jumped in with the trowel and started
slapping at the wet cement.

Bart said, “The
foreman couldn’t believe his eyes. The workers were laughing at him. My dad
didn’t know anything. It was humiliating. But he was trying.”

I asked, “What
happened?”

Bart said, “The
foreman laughed so hard, he hired my dad for having the guts to try.”

When I spoke to
my parents’ compadres Lupe and Peaches Herrera, long time west side residents,
I asked, “Why are you all such hardcore UCLA fans?”

Lupe answered,
“Look, Westwood is right up the road. After school, we would go watch the
Bruins practice. We knew all their names. There were no fences then. We could
sit on the sidelines.”

It was an answer
I’d heard from many of the west side Chicanos who loved sports.

Peaches (RIP) spoke
up, suspiciously, nudging Lupe. “That’s not the only reason,” she said, rolling
her eyes at him.

Confused, he
turned to her. “What else?”

“You guys used to
go goo-goo eyes over the coeds UCLA sent to our elementary school to tutor us.”

Sheepishly, he
answered, smiling, “Yeah, I guess that too.”

I asked Lupe if
he remembered racism ever being a problem.

Many men of my
dad’s generation answered no to this question. They had answered, “We called
each other names. If we fought, it wasn’t ‘cause of race but because we didn’t
like a guy. We played sports and all hung out together, Chicanos, Okies, and
Japanese.” To them any working-class whites seemed to be an Okies.

Lupe answered, “I
do remember one time when we’d go to the Tivoli Theater on Saturdays, a kid
would be standing there as we walked in. He’d send half of us to sit on one
side and half to sit on the other side. Once I realized, all the Chicanos and
Japanese were on one side and all the American kids were on the other side.

“I didn’t think
much of it. But when I got home, this one time, I told my sister Julia about
it. Whooo, she was tough. She went to the theater and told the guy she wanted
her brother to sit on the other side. She even went to see the manager. After
that, we all started sitting anywhere we wanted. I guess that was the only
time.”

To them, I
analyzed, the question of racial discrimination was tricky. If a person claimed
to have experienced racism, that made him or her a victim. It was clear that
the men and women of my dad’s generation refused to be victims. They saw
themselves as victors, just like the vegetable gardens they planted during the
war, which they called Victory Gardens. They triumphed over Hitler, Mussolini, and
Hirohito. They weren’t about to see themselves as victims.

Two older men I
interviewed separately, cousins Ysidro Reyes and Forrest Freed, (both now
deceased), descended from the Reyes, Marques families, early settlers of Santa
Monica Canyon and the lands along the mountains up to Westwood. The two seniors
were feisty and held tightly to their opinions. One was conservative, the other
liberal, one an entrepreneur, the other an educator. Both were close to 90,
hard workers, and active in community affairs.

The one question
I wanted answered was, “How did your families lose their land? I mean,
historians have written quite a bit about the early California rancheros and
how they lost their land.

Forrest, whose
mother was a Marquez, told me about his research and how he found so many
illicit, secretive, or ambiguous documents that proved the land had been stolen.
He told me that the government (the bank) could confiscate land from an absent
owner. First, a newspaper announcement had to be published notifying the absent
owners. While researching his family’s land, Forrest found an old newspaper
clipping announcing, “Inability to locate owners.”

Forrest spat,
“How could they not find the owners? Hell, my cousin Rosemary and my aunt
Angelina still live of parts of the original land grant.” Forrest fiercely
maintained that the family’s land was stolen.

Ysidro, on the
other hand, a small man, but firm in character, said, “Nobody was cheated out
of anything. That’s just ‘dijeron’.” When I pushed him further, he said, “My
family sold Pacific Palisades for $55,000 in 1885.” He looked at me, “You know
how people are, saying that everything was stolen, poor people,” (as in “poor
Mexicans”). He said, “No! It was their fault, nobody else’s. You wouldn’t be
anything if you sat there and just let the world go by. You’ve got to make
things [happen] yourself.”

A good memory for
me was when I interviewed my dad’s compadre George Saenz before he died,
Georgie to everyone in the neighborhood.

Georgie was a
coyote, a jokester. A handsome, short, light-skinned man, with bright blue eyes
and a wide smile, a sailor on a destroyer during WWII, he was a trained
carpenter who could fix any gadget you put in front of him.

Georgie’s parents
hailed from Parral de Chihuahua. He told me, “My dad was a captain in the Mexican
army. He hunted Pancho Villa. That’s why everybody in Sawtelle called my dad
Capitan Saenz. I don’t think they even knew his name,” he said, laughing.

His favorite
story was telling people how his mother, a strong-willed woman, broke the news
to her father when she decided to marry el capitan Saenz.

George said, “You
know, my mom was sixteen when she told her dad, ‘Me voy a casar con el Capitan
Saenz.’ Her dad said, ‘Ni apenas lo conoces’. You know what my mom answered?
She said, ‘Ni el a mi’,” and he laughed, as if it was the funniest thing in the
world.

Max Vigil was
rare among my father’s friends, a college graduate, an M.A. from Pepperdine. He
worked as an executive at Everest & Jennings, an early innovator in
manufacturing wheelchairs. From there, Max moved into politics, working for the
Reagan administration. Ironically, he quit high school in the tenth grade.

His mother taught
him the importance of education. In elementary school, he earned A’s. When he
got to junior high and earned an A in a difficult exam, his teacher accused him
of cheating. Max was shocked but didn’t argue. When he got to high school, the
same thing happened. “I realized what the teacher really meant was that a
Mexican couldn’t earn A’s without cheating. I was the only Chicano in class.
So, when he told me I cheated, in front of the whole class, it was humiliating,
degrading. I couldn’t face the other students, so I didn’t go back.”

He hitchhiked up
and down California, worked, and joined the army but was transferred to the Air
Force because his test scores were so high. “Some teachers made all us Chicanos
feel dumb and inadequate. A lot of guys quit school. But we were smart. We were
just like anybody else.”

Max was a natural
mentor. In my 20s, when life got tough, raising a family, holding down a
full-time job, and going to college at night, I’d see Max up the street
visiting his in-laws. He always walked up and asked how my studies were going. With
a serious look on his face, he’d say, “Danny, stick it out. Think of your
future. You are too smart to quit. If I did it, you can do it.” It just took a
few words of encouragement to get me over the hurdle.

I did ask Max why
he became a Republican. He said, “I followed politics. I read everything, since
I was ten years old. I couldn’t stand that Roosevelt (the Democratic president
at the time) was kissing Joe Stalin’s ass, one of the cruelest men who ever
lived.”

My aunt Toni
Escarcega (RIP) told me she remembered a time in Santa Monica when you could
walk from Cloverfield to Lincoln boulevard, about a mile’s distance, and “not
hear a word of English.” Nobody thinks of Mexican Santa Monica.

Another aunt,
Gloria (Gogi; RIP) told me that her father was so strict, she couldn’t even be
seen talking to a boy alone, even if the boy was a family friend. She said that
when she finally found a boy she liked, the two would meet at St. Anne’s Church
for the last mass. They would reach the container that held the holy water at the
exact same time. They would dip their fingertips in and rub fingers. It was the
closest she could get to having a real date.

What my mother,
Esther, recalled, were her Japanese neighbors on 22nd Street in
Santa Monica. “Veronica lived next door to us. She was so nice. I will always
remember how one day they were there, and the next day they were gone. It was
so sad, sent to a relocation camp.”

My father, a born
storyteller, told me, “You know, your grandfather was the last cattle baron in West
L.A.”

“Yeah?”

“He owned the
last cow in town. He would let it graze on a vacant lot behind the Nuart
Theater.”

“Wasn’t he
worried it would get stolen,” I asked?

“Nah,” my dad
answered. “There weren’t many cattle rustlers left in those days.”

As I write this,
I think about the cassette recordings and transcribed pages that call to me
from the desk drawers and file cabinets where I keep them. So many voices, so
many stories, a source of history and literature aching to be heard. And they
aren’t just cassettes and pages, or plastic and paper. They are people, my
elders.

I hear voices. I
know their names. I know their families and friends. It’s as if from the grave,
they are alive and calling, “Tell our stories. Don’t just bury us as if we’re
in a cemetery. Listen to Corky. Let our voices speak to others. Do something
with us. Don’t just leave us in these musty drawers.

And what about
those elders still alive? I need to get their stories. I need to collect all
the photos before the kids toss them into trash cans that get hauled off to the
Calabasas dump. Their voices say, “Don’t let that happen to us. Aren’t we just
as important as the stories you make up. Why not finish telling our story?
Listen to Corky. Stop burying libraries.”